The Sisters of Versailles

by Sally Christie

  I am very direct and keep to the point—what does she care if we had eels for dinner yesterday, or how Madame de Felingonge’s back pains are progressing? I ask her to invite me to Court or find me a husband. Then I write again and ask her to invite me to Court or find me a husband. Or secure me a place at Court, even if it’s in the service of some dreary old duchess. I don’t care. I just want to get out of here. But all I receive from Louise are infuriatingly sweet letters ignoring my requests and telling me to trust in God, because only He knows where my future husband is.

  And now my giggly sister Diane doesn’t laugh as much as she used to. She has taken to praying for five hours a day and even gets up for matins. She declares she is madly in love with Jesus, Mother Superior, and with one of the nuns called Sister Domingue.

  “Diane, I think you should focus on Sister Domingue; beneath her wimple she is certainly prettier than Mother Superior. Despite her pox scars. And she is probably prettier than Jesus,” I joke, trying to make her laugh.

  “Sister, my love for Jesus, and everyone else, can never be divided,” Diane replies, all haughty and hushy. “And I have asked you at least twenty times not to call me Diane—my name is Adelaide now. Diane is a pagan name. It’s not suitable for a woman with a strong religious vocation. You know I hate it and I don’t know why you always try to annoy me with it.”

  “Sorry, Adelaide.”

  The older ladies assure me that professing a great vocation is just a phase every girl goes through, like wanting to marry a duke or play with kittens all day. Some of the kinder ladies ask gently if it would be so bad if Diane, poor little jolly (as they call her), were to find a life of happiness inside convent walls? Not here—7,500 livres as dowry will not open the doors of Port-Royal—but they might take her elsewhere.

  It is certainly a blessing to have relatives in the Church, but we already have aunts in abbeys all over France. I want my fun sister back. I ask God for this, and while I’m asking for favors, I also remind Him that I want a husband and that I want to go to Versailles. I want to start living.

  From Pauline de Mailly-Nesle

  Convent of Port-Royal

  March 20, 1732

  Louise,

  I am sure you are in good health and happiness. Not I. I do not like life at the convent and I want to leave. I want to get married. I hope you can find me a husband, please ask Tante Mazarin and anyone else you can if they can help me.

  I also want to come and visit you at Court, I think you should remember your sororal duties and invite me for a visit. Remember wise Zélie, who always said that sororal love was the highest love? Please do not forget me.

  I miss you very much, I think about you every day, sometimes I cry because I miss you so much. Diane cries too. I would love to see you again and I suggest you invite me to Versailles.

  Thank you for writing with the news of the Duchesse d’Antin’s dress. Imagine a pink satin petticoat sewn with white posies—fascinating! How I would like to see that dress myself! If you invite me to Versailles, I could see it and then I would be even more fascinated.

  Diane thanks you for the lace ribbons. She sewed them onto the cuffs of her convent dress but the nuns make her take them off on Sundays. She sends her love; she wishes she could have written but a bee stung her finger and now she has some difficulty holding her quill.

  With much sororal love,

  Pauline

  Louise

  VERSAILLES

  1732

  The fashions here are simply extraordinary. Gowns of silk and satin, velvet and fur, brocades in winter, fine muslins and gauze in the summer. Everywhere there are ruffles and lace and bows and ribbons and flowers. And feathers and jewels and bells and even little stuffed birds, adorning dresses all the pale colors of the sun and the moon. If one wears a dress too often, friends will remind you that you are not in the provinces and they claim that seeing the same garment too often affronts their eyes and may even cause blindness. They complain that dark colors give them headaches: why wear brown when one can wear pink?

  The more daring women push out their legs while seated so their gowns and petticoats fall away and reveal their pretty satin shoes, sewn with pearls and decorated with delicate buckles. Some even dare to show their shocking white stockings and I have heard that the Comtesse de Rupelmonde wears a bejeweled garter that cost more than a pair of horses.

  I have a fair number of dresses, but most of them are hopelessly plain when compared to what the other ladies wear. Everything must be beautiful, but everything must be paid for. Not immediately—dressmakers are generous with credit—but eventually. I receive a pension as a lady of the queen, but what are 8,000 livres a year when some ladies (and gentlemen too, for the men must be as well dressed as the women) spend five thousand livres for just one outfit? How I envy my friend Gilette, the Duchesse d’Antin; her husband is one of the richest men at Court and I have never seen her wear the same dress twice. Never; not even one turned inside out!

  I have learned that my husband is rather short on money. I do my best with my old wardrobe and have become very adept at arranging ruffles or bows on old gowns to make them look new again. And original, for though everyone here must speak and act the same, everyone wants to be noticed. Recently, Gilette admired my simple green gown, the stomacher sewn with bands of real white carnations. Gilette usually reserves her speech for snide remarks or gossip, but this time she complimented me on my elegance and creativity. And I think she meant it.

  Gilette is also constantly urging me to forget Louis-Alexandre. She has a lover, as do so many women here, but I am adamant that I will be faithful to my husband. I must be accountable for my sins before God. And besides, I don’t have children yet.

  “But you can have fun without being strictly unfaithful,” says Gilette in her light voice. “There are ways.”

  “And where would be the fun of that?” Mademoiselle de Charolais laughs. “Don’t be foolish, Gilette.” Mademoiselle de Charolais is a sister of the queen’s surintendante, Mademoiselle de Clermont, but unlike her sister she is very beautiful. She is not married but takes lovers as she pleases and routinely disappears for a month or two, complaining of a “bellyache.” I suppose when one is the granddaughter of a king, one can do anything.

  “I am surprised you would need to be educated about the ways, mademoiselle,” banters Gilette.

  “Oh, please, you have no need to insult me.” Charolais and many of the women here wear their looseness like a necklace they are proud of, for all to see. “Let’s just say I moved beyond that phase long, long ago,” she continues. “A very long time ago. Now I am not satisfied until . . . shall we say the hand has been fitted into the glove?”

  “Tush, we need to start small,” says Gilette, laughing and squeezing my shoulder with her cream-gloved hand. “A mild flirtation for our little Louise would be a very fine first step.”

  “On a ladder with many rungs,” finishes Charolais with a smirk. “And oh! What delights await you at the top.”

  I try not to blush. A flirtation might be nice and certainly possible in this palace of a thousand gallants, but I am afraid that if I start down that path I might find myself at the end of it like Gilette and Charolais and so many other pincushions. Though it is sometimes hard to find Him amidst the many Greek and Roman gods that line the walls of the palace, I must always remember that God can see us everywhere, even at Versailles.

  But when one is surrounded by vice, that which shocks fast becomes normal.

  May is simply the most delightful month at Court; the rooms are warm again and the sun shines and in the gardens the cherry and lime trees molt their blossoms over the ground like snow. One fine afternoon the queen calls for easels and paints to be brought outside that we might pass the afternoon painting.

  “We must inspiration,” announces the queen. Inspiration was yesterday’s word.

  “Madame,” says the Princesse de Montauban in a voice thick with honey and thinned with sarcasm, “your memo
ry never ceases to astound me.” Mademoiselle de Clermont, formidable in her position and her birth, fixes a sharp eye on Montauban, who smiles back innocently.

  We settle on the grass in the North Parterre, encircled by hedges of strictly cut rosebushes. “Get those away from me,” hisses Tante Mazarin as a hapless footman approaches her with a palette of paints. “Not while I am wearing my brown satin. Colored mud—that’s all paint is. Stay away.”

  Then she slips easily into a light voice and sidles up to the queen. “Madame, why would I want to paint myself when I can watch the glory of your art? It would be far more prudent of me to admire your work and learn from such talent.”

  The queen smiles thinly and settles at her easel in front of a small rosebush. I now believe the queen knows false flattery but is too weary to protest the compliments that flow her way. I watch the half smile that stays on her lips. She is in a good humor these days: she just gave birth to another little daughter and is still enjoying the loose robes of pregnancy.

  A few of us take easels and canvas. I like painting; it is easier than reading and it is a wonderful thing to preserve the beauty of nature. Real flowers wither and die but a painting lasts forever. My favorite part is mixing the colors; on this fateful day I search for the perfect shade of pink, a soft blush color, to capture the very inside of the little rose I have chosen as my model. If only I could order a dress of the same color! But I have already ordered two new dresses this year, and it is only May. If I am not careful my bull of a husband will come raging at me about money again. I turn my mind away from those unpleasant thoughts and start to paint.

  The Princesse de Montauban is as skilled at painting as she is at sarcasm. She makes me a little bit afraid; for months after I arrived she complimented me profusely on the elegant way I took my coffee. Then Gilette took me aside (though only sometime later) and told me I was doing it all wrong: one never, but never, must let the third finger touch the cup.

  Soon Montauban’s delicate depiction of a bright pink rose is receiving compliments all around, though of course everyone must praise the queen’s bush more. A group of gentlemen appears round the hedges. I know most of them, but only in the slight way that everyone knows everyone at Versailles. The men admire the queen’s work and Montauban’s beautiful rose. Then they turn to Gilette’s canvas. Gilette has painted her rose in a very odd manner, concentrating only on the opening of the bud and making it more oval than round.

  “Well, well, well, what is this unusual flower you are painting, Madame d’Antin? It is exceedingly beautiful. What do you call such a rose?”

  “It is a cocksglove,” one man declares.

  “No, I do believe it is that sweetest of all roses, the Latin name being Cuntus mirabilus,” another replies.

  I giggle despite myself. Such lewd talk!

  “I’ve heard the petals are good enough to eat, though sometimes a little pungent and fishlike,” the first man says.

  “Such children,” hisses the Duchesse de Boufflers, steering her great bulk away. She and Tante Mazarin create a protective wall of chatter around the queen. One of the men detaches himself from the group and comes over to my easel. He is very handsome and is wearing an exquisite cream coat sewn with violets. I know his wife quite well, a pleasant woman who always wears a ribbon around her neck—it is whispered that men have been known to faint at the sight of the wine mark she hides beneath her choker.

  “It’s beautiful,” he says softly, looking at me and not at my canvas.

  I blush. “Oh, no, sir. I am an amateur.”

  “The painting, perhaps, though the color is nice. What a perfect shade of pink. But the real work of art, madame, stands before me.”

  He takes a step closer and I look in his eyes and then a curious thing happens: the world recedes and everything around me—the queen, the courtiers, the bushes and the flowers, Gilette’s dirty painting, even the sun and the grass and the heat of the day—they all disappear and then there is only him and I, alone together.

  I think: So this is love.

  Only the setting sun breaks the spell and returns us to reality. When at last the man draws himself away from me, he bows low and lingers over my hand.

  “Would you do me the honor of presenting me with your delightful rose, madame?”

  I blush.

  He gestures to the half-finished painting.

  “Oh. Of course . . . but it’s . . . it’s not finished.”

  “It is perfect as it is,” he says, with one last long look in my eyes. He leaves with the rest of the gentlemen and I stare after him as they disappear down the path. Gilette skips up and pinches my arm.

  “Our little Louise has made a conquest,” she says in a too-loud voice.

  “Oh, nonsense,” I say. “Shhh. He is just a kind man.”

  “Just a kind man with the most handsome face since Jupiter!” chips in the Princesse de Montauban, poking a brush dripping with cerise paint at me.

  “And with that disgusting thing on his wife’s neck, he’ll be easy pickings, I’m sure,” adds Gilette. “Oh, my little Louise, you are starting to climb the ladder. I am so proud of you!”

  I giggle despite myself, rather intoxicated by what has just happened. I see Tante Mazarin bustling toward me and I know a lecture is coming.

  “Deliver it to my apartment,” I call out to a footman, pointing at my canvas, and then Gilette and I sprint up the steps to the terrace, laughing all the way.

  His name is Philogène.

  Puysieux is his family name, but I call him by his Christian name, Philogène. What a name! I could say his name for hours. Philogène, Philogène, Philogène. He is so handsome, thirty years old and in the prime of his life. He is perhaps the most handsome man I have ever seen. Dare I say he is more handsome than the king? Would that be treason? But I think it is true. He has big beautiful eyes and an elegant nose and wonderful white teeth and a large mole just below his ear, that I call his beauty patch. He is always dressed elegantly and his favorite color is blue—the same as me! Beside him, my husband looks like quite the country lawyer.

  I do believe he is perfect. Philogène, I mean, not Louis-Alexandre.

  Philogène, Philogène, Philogène.

  In addition to being the most handsome man at Court, he is also very intelligent and charming. He has the high regard of the king and his ministers, and has traveled abroad many times on Court business. He has even lived in Sweden, a cold country filled with Protestants; he says they are not as awful as one might think.

  At first I resist and insist I wish to remain chaste, but my friends are having none of it. They tell me that Philogène is the most handsome man at Court and that he is dying of love for me, and then they remind me again about my husband and that sword maker’s daughter.

  I feel my will crumbling. I am not a very strong person to begin with and Versailles has definitely changed me. Rather rapidly too. And . . . surely there are greater sins?

  The other ladies tease and prod to know how my affair is progressing and ask why it is already July, yet all the world knows I have not given in to Puysieux? I don’t ask how all the world knows; scandals here are like spring buds that flower with gossip as their water.

  Once a footman, blushing scarlet, carried a ladder into the salon where we sit with Her Majesty.

  “The ladder you ordered, Madame de Mailly?” The other ladies peal with laughter, but instead of blushing and losing myself in confusion as I might have done when I first arrived, I say calmly: “No, you may take it away. I don’t need it.” I wait a beat, then add: “But perhaps in a week or two.” Gilette and Montauban cheer and Tante’s eyes look to bulge out of their head. The queen beams in confusion, laughing eagerly though she knows not the joke.

  Clermont glares at us with icicle eyes then says smoothly to the queen: “Madame de Mailly thought to help you practice escalate, madame.” Escalate was Wednesday’s word.

  I sink back in my seat, feeling like a true versailloise. And I think my friends
might be right: Perhaps I could use a different view? My resolve is disappearing like dew on a hot morning.

  The next day I kiss Philogène for the first time, then spend the night in the chapel praying away my sin.

  Gilette studies me. “Where were you last night? We missed you at the tables.”

  “Oh, a touch of indigestion.” I wave my hands vaguely over my stomach. Gilette peers at me suspiciously.

  “Not that kind of bellyache?”

  “Oh, goodness, no.” I blush. I wish it were. It would be nice to have a child, not with my brute husband . . . but with Philogène? I still see Louis-Alexandre occasionally, so if I were to become pregnant the baby could well be his. Besides, everyone knows the most important thing is to have the child, not who the father is.

  Oh, such thoughts, to so quickly undo my night of penance!

  Philogène is ardent and seeks every opportunity to be at my side. Soon we are kissing and more in the shadows and spending every free moment in the privacy of the hedge-high gardens and mazes.

  It is a beautiful August day of warm wind and sun. We make our way slowly down the vast stone staircase to the Orangery and on every one of the hundred steps, Philogène stops me to declare another reason why he loves me.

  “Step thirty-three: your brown eyes with flecks of green—enchanting! Step thirty-four: your little yawns when you are bored. Step thirty-five: that piece of hair that comes loose”—and here, despite my protests, he pulls a strand free from its pins—“. . . and sparkles in the sunlight.”

  Remaining chaste is becoming harder with every passing day. For the first time, I want a man who is not Louis-Alexandre. I know that with Philogène it would be different. Very different.

  “You must think of your sisters,” Tante hisses at me. “You must consider Hortense and Marie-Anne.” I am becoming adept at avoiding her. Versailles is an easy place to get lost in and I take care to schedule my weeks with the queen for when she is not in attendance. Despite my best efforts, our calendars sometimes collide.